We are pleased to announce the availability of Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 8.5. This release adds new scenarios to help organizations assess their environments with greater agility and lower their cost of delivery. MAP Toolkit 8.5 includes hardware and infrastructure readiness assessments to help organizations plan their Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 deployments. It also helps organizations assess their environment for Office 2013 and Office 365, track usage of Windows Server 2012, Lync Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, and Exchange Server 2013, and preparing a migration to Windows Azure virtual machines.
For a comprehensive list of features and benefits, click here.
Windows Volume Licensing scenario helps to assess license status of computers running Windows Vista SP1 and newer
For organizations licensing Windows, MAP Toolkit 8.5 detects and reports on the version of Windows running on client computers within the organization. This helps customers to manage investments in Software Assurance and deploy upgrades appropriately.
Usage Tracking for Lync 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Exchange 2013
Groundbreaking releases of Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange were brought to market this year. MAP 8.5 leverages new usage tracking capabilities provided by these products to achieve greater accuracy collecting and reporting on end user access without the need to parse log files, resulting in a faster and more efficient usage tracking process.
Enhanced Virtual Machine discovery
As organizations leverage server virtualization to optimize their resources, availability, and agility, the added virtual machine discovery and reporting capabilities of MAP Toolkit 8.5 help organizations manage assets and license compliance across virtualized environments. Enhanced inventory reports list the virtual machines discovered and the number of virtual machines running on each host. Because licenses are allocated to the physical host specifying the number that can be run, these reports directly support license compliance.
New and improved user interface
The updated user interface in MAP Toolkit 8.5 provides a more intuitive user experience. Scenario groups help users quickly navigate and view at-a-glance summaries on individual scenario tiles. Details for individual scenarios appear on the scenario detail pages along with a checklist of steps users can use to maximize results and enable one-click report generation.
Improved Documentation
As part of our ongoing attempt to improve documentation, the Getting Started Guide for the MAP Toolkit is now available as part of our MAP Toolkit Wiki. Our new live documentation method allows us to deliver relevant and up-to-date product information, timely usage examples, and adapt to changing technologies between releases.
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